While In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez, and When the Emperor Was Divine, by Julie Otsuka, address very different political conflicts at different points in history, there is an important similarity between the main characters—they are considered to be enemies of the state. The circumstances of the Mirabal sisters, however, strike a deep contrast to the situation of the father in When the Emperor Was Divine.
In the Time of the Butterflies details the true story of Patria, Minerva, Dedé, and Maté Mirabal, four sisters who, with their husbands, were involved in the revolutionary movement to overthrow Dominican dictator el Trujillo. When the Emperor Was Divine is a pure novel, based only on the collective experience of the thousands of Japanese-Americans who were internally displaced to internment camps in the Western United States after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. There are four members of the protagonist family: the mother, the father, a young girl, and a younger boy. The mother and the children are sent to the Nevada desert, while the father was arrested and imprisoned. Like Minerva and Maté Mirabal, the father was tortured for information to such a severe degree that there were permanent physical scars, not to mention deep emotional wounds.
Ultimately, these sets of characters experience disparate outcomes, for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly is the difference in how the characters became involved in the respective conflicts. The Mirabal sisters, led by Minerva and heavily influenced by Leandro, among others, chose their own paths. While the girls certainly felt, on a moral level, that they had no choice but to act, they were still free to either actively join or avoid the resistance movement. The Japanese-American father in Otsuka’s story, however, had no such choice. Simple because of his ethnic heritage and upper middle class status that enabled him to work and travel, this love father and faithful husband was dragged from his home by force in the middle of the night. Unlike Minerva and Maté, he was not in prison to take an ideological stand against gross abuse of human rights; instead, he was stripped of all dignity for no reason. This does not in any way reduce the significance of the horrific torture that the Mirabal sisters were subjected to. It does help to explain, however, the state of being for the dad versus the sisters after being declared enemies of the state.
The Mirabal sisters were fighting for something that they truly believed in. They also had each other, and their husbands. Even in jail, Minerva and Maté were in the same cell with other women, and therefore had someone they knew and trusted to watch over them. The father, on the other hand, was completely alone. His only connection to his previous life was the letters from his family, who had a very limited idea of what was being done to him. His torture was entirely based on falsities that he had done nothing to invoke. Upon his return home to Berkley, the father in Otsuka’s novel was far more broken than the Mirabal sisters, who had something to keep fighting for. Their support system had not been completely decimated, as the father’s was, and they had a place to go home to, rather than a broken memory that needed complete rebuilding. Additionally, the girls and their husbands were seen as underground heroes, not social and cultural lepers. Finally, of course, there is the way in which the stories end: the three Mirabal sisters most involved in the conflict were killed. This is horrific by any and every standard; however, the father in When the Emperor Was Divine faces perhaps the most difficult challenge of all: returning to his life and facing the daunting task of restoring some normalcy to his existence. Again, there is nothing good about the deaths of Las Mariposas, but these story’s endings helps to articulate the differences that defined their experience, versus the fathers, as an ‘enemy of the state.’
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